Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul A. Volcker

Volcker’s distrust of the “new paradigm” is less about resisting innovation than resisting the sales pitch that usually comes with it. In the late 20th century, “paradigm shift” became the managerial incense you burn when old rules start to look inconvenient: if the economy has fundamentally changed, then leverage isn’t dangerous, bubbles are just “revaluations,” and regulators are stuck guarding a world that no longer exists. Volcker, the archetypal central banker who broke inflation by insisting gravity still works, hears that language and recognizes a familiar dodge.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Suspicious” signals a prosecutor’s posture, not an academic one: he’s not debating theory so much as interrogating motives. “To use that word” distances him from the buzzword itself, marking it as jargon imported from boardrooms and pundit panels. Then he narrows the target: not incremental evolution, but “an entirely new structure of the economy” - the sweeping claim that the fundamentals have been rewritten.

Context matters because Volcker lived through repeated cycles of alleged transformation: financial deregulation, the rise of complex derivatives, the 1990s “New Economy,” the pre-2008 belief that risk had been engineered away. His subtext is a warning about moral hazard disguised as optimism. When elites declare a new structure, they’re often asking for permission to stop remembering history. Volcker’s intent is to re-anchor the conversation in continuity: incentives persist, speculation repeats, and debt still has a due date, no matter how modern the packaging looks.